Photo by Jolie O'dell
Google’s Marissa Mayer recently spoke to the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) on the Stanford University campus. The title of her talk was “Innovation and Iteration,” although she covered far more that that.
Over the course of an hour, Mayer shared stories about her college career at Stanford, her struggles choosing a career path and the decision-making process that eventually drew her to join Google as employee #20. While the title of her talk hints at her philosophy as an engineer, the most valuable advice that she revealed was about the process of making tough decisions.
Upon graduating from Stanford with a Masters in 1999, Mayer had no shortage of job offers. This was the height of the bubble, and she had over a dozen offers that included consulting, teaching, working for large tech companies, and several startups.
Looking for common threads from her past experiences, she used these two guidelines as lenses while reviewing her choices:
1) Work with the smartest people you can find.
- When you work with the smart people, they elevate you and make you think about things in a new and different way.
2) Do something that you aren’t ready to do.
- Doing things you aren’t comfortable with or haven’t mastered helps you to grow and to figure out what you can (and can’t) do.
While we know that these guidelines eventually helped her choose Google, it was still not a clear decision for her. Mayer told a story about building a large matrix where she mapped out the characteristics of each opportunity (in true engineer fashion) like salary, potential for success, and indexes for happiness and lifestyle.
She gave herself a deadline for making the decision. On midnight before the morning of her deadline, she burst into tears. She called a good friend for consolation, and he gave her some of the best advice for making decisions, which she uses to this day.
The advice she received was that there was no one right answer. She had a lot of really good choices in front of her, and it was up to her to pick one and make it great. Eleven years later, as VP and Board Member of one of the most successful technology companies in the world, I think it’s safe to say that she did just that.
